I wrote a quick overview of Rails Metal earlier and started thinking that it would be nice to provide some examples of how you could use it in your Rails application. Here are 9 ways I thought of off the top of my head.
I’ll provide a quick explanation of each one and then post the code as I get each one done.
1. Authentication checking
Many sites have two parts to them. The administrative side—which is protected by an authentication system—and the public side—which anyone can access. If a user must be logged in to access the admin/authenticated part of the site, then why not take advantage of the performance boost Rails Metal gives you and redirect before the Rails even gets loaded.
UPDATE: I just posted the an explanation of how to do Rails Metal Authentication.
2. OpenID checking
Similar to the Authentication checking, you can do a quick check of the user’s authentication status with their OpenID and let them through if they are already authenticated. It’s kind of like a convenient before_filter call on that section of your website.
3. Simple API’s
API’s are extremely simple to implement with Rails Metal. If you have a convenient method on the Model to convert a given instance into the format the API user expects—to_json for example—then you could simply provide a success response with the converted object as the response text.
UPDATE: I just posted the code and explanation on how to do API’s in Rails Metal.
4. Redirecting Affiliate Links
Have you ever built a site that made money from advertising and wished you could send people to http://mydomain.com/hosting for your hosting affiliate? This would be one of the simplest uses of Rails Metal. Check the path and redirect.
UPDATE: I just posted the an explanation of how to do Rails Metal Redirects.
5. Serving Static Content
If you have pages or some other type of content that doesn’t change from one page load to the next and you don’t need the nice templating magic that the Ruby on Rails layouts give you, then this solution is for you. It allows you to make these pages database driven.
UPDATE: I just posted the an explanation of how to serve Static Content and Pages using Rails Metal.
6. Serving Downloads
Regardless of whether the file you’re serving is a file in the filesystem, or has its data stored in the database, all you really need is the file’s mime-type and its content. Then you give a success response with the content type set in the header and the file content in the response text.
7. Tracking Analytics
Rails Metal was designed to be a possible endpoint for your application, meaning that it returns a response and stops execution. However, you can perform some function and then pass the execution on to the remainder of your application. So storing visits to certain paths is a cinch with Rails Metal.
8. Serving Cached Content
Are you caching your content to memcached or the filesystem? For memcached, loading cached content is as easy as loading the memcached client gem and accessing memcached with they key. The rest is caching on the part of your rails application.
9. Triggering Server Side Events (Jobs and Rake Tasks)
Have you ever thought it would be convenient to hit a particular URL and have it kick off a process on your server? Obviously you’d have to secure it, but we can do that with another Rails Metal that checks authentication. (See #1 and #2.)
If you have any other uses that you’re putting Rails Metal to, let us all know in the comments below.